Bruises and goofy smiles and Picasso

It seems that I am destined to perform a face plant no matter where I am on the planet.  My sister Bari and I are used to it.  We do it often.  Check our knees every now and then.  You'll see.  My performance occurred when I was headed toward the bus and I was looking at the street instead of the uneven gravel path I was hurrying over.  Splat!  A little boy walking back to school from the lunch break saw me.  At least he didn't laugh.  He stared.  I don't know if that was worse.  :)

Then, the other day when I was trying to get the middle doors on the bus to open so I could enter there, they didn't work.  When I went to the front bus entrance, the driver shut the door on me.  Slam!  right on my hand.  Another bruise.

I'm still having fun.  Bruised or not.  lol

 Riding the rails Swiss style

I never showed you what the Swiss Pass looks like which I purchased when I first got to CH.  It is coming up due for renewal this week.  Wow.  That means I've been here a month.  Can you believe it???  It doesn't seem like that long.  

Anyways.... it is good on all public trains, buses, boats, and it provides free entrance to all the museums.  It is not cheap.  There are a few private transportation lines like the Jungfraujoch train that you still have to pay for, but you get a discounted price--25% or 50% off.  

Main terminal in Zurich

The Farhplan is a listing of all the trains, buses, trams, or cable cars you have to ride to get you to any specific destination.  You go to the window at the station and say, "I want the Fahrplan to go from here to the top of the Matterhorn, starting now."  And they will print it out for you.  

This example is from when I went from Grindelwald to Gimmelwald.  It shows that I caught the first train at 8:19 a.m. and it arrived in Zweilutschinen at 8:41 where I had to get off and change to another train to go to Lauterbrunnen.  My new train departed at 8:46.  After arriving at Lauterbrunnen, I had a 2-minute walk to a bus which left at 9:05 for Stechelberg....and so on.  Cool, eh?  I can go anywhere in the country.  I can even purchase a version and go out of the country--say a day trip somewhere else.  But with these kind of instructions, I am one happy gal.

The Swiss train system is intricately timed so that you have just the right amount of time to make your transfer to the new train--no dawdling.  The trains are always on time.  :)

Afraid of heights?  Not me!

The other day I found out that there was a cable car that you could ride to the top of the mountain and it had an upper deck open to the air.  That sounded very cool to me.  (pardon the pun)

This great adventure took me to Luzern, as the Swiss Germans call it and Lucerne as others call it.  May I say that this was the most beautiful area I have seen.  It just caught my heart.  If I ever got a job and lived in CH, I'd try to locate myself somewhere in the Luzern area.  You'll see.

I am riding up on the top of the gondola.  It is very windy and very cool.  (double entendre) Looking out over the valley and mountain you can see the beauty.

There is another view with the cable car lines.  Look how far up we are.  My ears popped four times.  What you can see below is the town, surrounding houses, and Lake Luzern.  

 

Here is what the cable car looked like as I took a picture while I was at the top and this car was leaving to go back down.  It's really funny because no one rides inside the gondola and everyone crowds up on the top.  Those with fear of heights just hold on tighter to the rails.  This area was so beautiful.  I loved it.  

While walking back to the train station, this sign was on the path.  I have nieces and nephews who will be chuckling when they read this sign. (OK, I did too.  Why do you think I took the picture of it???) And along that same line....I took this picture a while back during the skyride.  

Some words in other languages make you laugh.  That's all I'm sayin'.


The angel with a lamp

Luzern comes from the Latin lucerna for "lamp".  Supposedly, an angel shown a heavenly spotlight down on the site and so the town grew around a monastery.  In the 1300s The Chapel Bridge was built at an angle across the river.  

In the 1600s, the bridge was decorated with paintings depicting the development of the town.  Each painting shows the coat of arms from the family who sponsored it at the time.  There is even one which portrays the angel shining the lamp down to designate the place to build.

In 1993 a boat moored under the bridge caught fire and so did the middle of the bridge.  Many of the paintings were lost.  The bridge was painstakingly rebuilt.  Some of the paintings have been restored, a couple were left completely black to be a reminder of the loss, and some in the middle are actual paintings from the era which were in storage when the fire occurred.

Along with the really interesting bridge, there were some beautiful swans.  The school children feed their leftover bread to the swans and the tourists do too.







The art of the artist at work

Girl with a toy boat (1938)

One really interesting museum was the Rosengart Museum in Luzern.  It has quite an extensive collection of Picasso. I enjoyed viewing the work of Picasso from the early 1930s up to the 1950s.  It was interesting to see how his work developed as the years progressed.

This was taken by my cell phone camera from a postcard I purchased.

Even more interesting was a collection of photographs by David Douglas Duncan.  He took several dozen of candid black and white photographs of Picasso in his home during his daily life.  Pictures show him working, playing with his kids, goofing around, and being an artist--every picture contained so much information about what was on the table in his home, what was laying around on the floor, what was hanging on the walls.  I was completely fascinated with these inside peeks at the artist himself.  Loved it.

This particular picture is one I took from a postcard.  It is Picasso with Angela Rosengart, wife of the museum benefactor, taken by Picasso's wife Jacqueline in Oct. 1963.

Stay tuned for more adventures tomorrow.  I had too much to tell in one blog.  :)